


found me when i was young

by Verbyna



Series: goes without saying [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Confessions, Dissociation, Emotional Baggage, M/M, Past Infidelity, Tenderness, Unhealthy Relationships, celebrity/bodyguard AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23844163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: Maybe they can go to the beach. He wants to watch Geralt walk into the shallow water and then join him, keep walking until it reaches their shoulders, and take his hand so the waves don’t pull them apart.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: goes without saying [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1717933
Comments: 39
Kudos: 172





	found me when i was young

**Author's Note:**

> title from "sorrow" by the national, beta'd by my pal SummerFrost.
> 
> (this is still pretty heavy angst, but not hurt-no-comfort like the previous installment.)

“You have it all wrong,” Yennefer tells him in early June, when they run into each other at a new Instagrammable yoga studio. “I wasn’t the other woman, I was just _a_ woman. You were the only man.”

Jaskier gets a perverse, petty sort of pleasure from seeing how much more beautiful she is than all the other women there.

*

Sometimes he thinks about the fact that Geralt’s choice was between two people: one he could make happy just by showing up, the other he couldn’t make happy at all. Yennefer would’ve been the obvious choice, but he came back as soon as Jaskier asked for him. Jaskier even wrote a song about hammers and nails, thinking about it - about Yennefer, the hammer that drove Jaskier into Geralt. How guilt tied him to Jaskier instead.

Maybe love is just death by a thousand cuts. Maybe it was a kindness, if not Geralt’s then on the part of the universe, that Jaskier was delivered a stab instead. Maybe it spared him smaller hurts, all the effort it would’ve taken to mend them.

His father had a saying, God rest his soul: _life gives us lemons and we pray for knives._

*

He writes love songs, but he’s single, and people notice that. The ones who do are more likely to call him mediocre, as though the music is worthless because it’s not a dispatch from some mythical land of happiness-ever-after.

Jaskier is a name for exile. It’s an expat name, more easily carried than Julian, the fool who made a home in that mythical land and can’t return to it.

All Jaskier can do is sing about the place he’s from. Luminous, they called the first album - he wrote it in the dark, on his old staircase, to the sound of Geralt fucking Yennefer. Already he’d been so far from happiness that all he could think of was what he’d lost, those rare moments of peace beside Geralt, trusting him not to break the silence as the sun rose. The way the sun rose just for them, in the window, to allow for that trust.

He still trusts Geralt, of course. To take a bullet, to shove fingers down Jaskier’s throat, to fuck him down from shows. It is a different trust - it’s the animal in him that knows it won’t be gutted in the night with Geralt close by.

The peace they have now is the aftermath of a shipwreck. It’s the beach they washed up on after surviving the worst thing that could’ve happened. Jaskier lives here, dreaming of home.

Geralt would never let anything else happen to him.

*

They’re between tours now and Jaskier wants to be alone. He refuses interviews and appearances, claims he’s resting, but he just needs some time away from the performance of it all. It’s exhausting to be himself.

That was the point, of course. When he built this new life, in that year he spent away from Geralt, he built it so it would take all his focus. It leaves no energy for feeling sorry for himself, even if it can’t stop Triss from pitying them both.

He wears linen houseclothes and sits in the shade by the pool. He makes lemonade, sangria, iced tea like he learned in Nashville. Eats mango and pineapple, cheese and olives and salsiccia, everything he puts on his rider but enjoys more when he’s not being watched. He takes his oldest guitar outside with him, but the acoustics aren’t very good. He doesn’t try to write.

(He says grace for meals, if only in his head. It doesn’t carry into anything else, the grace, but it makes him feel better. Like maybe he’s still a person his father might’ve recognized, underneath it all.)

Walking into the house is like walking into a cool, dark cave. He savors the shiver and considers painting it red, painting it black. His walls and floors are grey concrete and there are no curved edges anywhere. Maybe some rugs. Maybe more plants - maybe what he needs is just more plants, large ones, like indoor trees. His bathrooms are already halfway to ecosystems.

For two weeks he sees no one and doesn’t say a single word out loud.

And then he wakes up one morning in his massive bed and is overcome with the urge to see Geralt.

He throws off the sheet and lies there, shivering in the cold, allowing the urge to settle. He’s familiar with the tingles in his fingers and toes, the way his body remembers what it was like to be happy and demands more of it; when his heart broke, the rest of him didn’t get the message.

(If he doesn’t think, he can pretend he’s in Leeds after his last gig as Julian, rushing to take the train back to London to see Geralt.)

He has breakfast before he sends the text.

He has that much dignity left.

*

He thinks if he’d maybe had a friend, someone who knew - but Renfri was away on a charity tour when it all happened. He couldn’t talk about it with anyone else, and then he couldn’t talk about it at all. She has two kids now, twins. He calls her by her title in public, when they run into each other. They haven’t been alone together since they were still in school and no one else knew what to do with them.

It’s strange missing someone whose face you see in pictures every day - he wonders if she feels that way about him, too. She never introduced him to the kids. She would’ve loved Geralt before she had to go become what her country needed, every crease in her smoothed out.

*

Geralt lets himself into Jaskier’s house. He comes outside, where Jaskier’s sitting on the edge of the pool.

“Do you want your guitar?” he asks. His hair is almost blinding in full sunlight. It hurts to look at him. Jaskier nods and looks away.

Geralt brings him the guitar and puts it down next to Jaskier. It doesn’t have a strap, and he knows Jaskier can only tolerate being handed instruments by their strap. He learned that when Jaskier was still busking. He used to carry the case for him, on his way to the club for shifts.

Jaskier strums aimlessly and listens to the birdsong. In the distance, people are driving their cars, going about their lives. He doesn’t know what Geralt does when he’s not with him. He chances another look at Geralt and is relieved that Geralt’s not watching him.

“I’m going to buy more plants. Big ones. I need you to let the delivery people in.”

“Hm,” Geralt says. “For the foyer?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t offer an opinion, but then, he never does. He just does what Jaskier tells him, so he can never accidentally do something Jaskier doesn’t want. It’s exhausting. _They’re_ exhausting. God.

The strumming turns into _Hammers and Nails_ and Geralt turns his face into the sunlight.

“You ran into Yennefer,” he says, very neutral.

“She looked surprisingly elegant in yoga pants.”

“Hm.”

Geralt eventually stretches and goes inside to get drinks for them. There’s still lemonade in the fridge from yesterday, but the glass he gives Jaskier is fresh, sweeter than what he made for himself. Their fingers brush and Jaskier almost recoils; he’s been without human contact long enough that it’s jarring to be touched.

He knows the sex would be very intense, if they fucked now. But no, he’s feeling okay. There’s no tension in him. There’s no reason for Geralt to do anything like that for him.

“You’re getting sunburnt,” he tells Geralt. Not because he looked, but because it’s been longer than ten minutes. “There’s sunscreen in the bathroom.”

Geralt goes and comes back smelling like a holiday.

Before he went to Leeds that last time, Jaskier _(Julian)_ had almost convinced Geralt to go to Brighton for a weekend with him, spend some time at the beach. He wrote two songs about what it might’ve been like, one happy and one sad.

There were a lot of things they didn’t get to do.

“We were happy,” he tells Geralt. “I remember.”

Geralt exhales like he was just punched in the stomach. “I wish -” he says, but doesn’t finish the thought. Shakes his head and looks at the glass sweating in his hand. “Yes, we were. Didn’t seem like it at the time.”

“I don’t think either of us knew what happiness felt like. Lucky us. Now we do.”

*

Jaskier orders three plants, one of them almost twice his height. He stands in the foyer with Geralt after the delivery guys leave, looking up at the giant leaves.

“Too much?” he asks.

Geralt hums and shakes his head, then shrugs. “It’s your house.”

“Did they tell you how much water they need?”

“No. I’ll go look that up.”

He leaves Jaskier there, in his own personal forest. The light is too diffuse for the plants to cast clear shadows. They don’t seem real against all the concrete, but the leaves are waxy and solid when he touches them. He rubs his neck, then; solid, real. But his hand on it doesn’t feel like it belongs to him.

Everything under this roof belongs to him, he tells himself, and the roof too.

He follows the sound of Geralt’s off-key humming into the kitchen and sits with him at the island. They figure out how much water the plants need and email Jaskier’s gardener, for when they’re on tour.

*

Geralt takes the guest bedroom when Jaskier doesn’t ask him to leave that night.

He keeps not asking Geralt to leave for two weeks, until he’s so used to not being alone that he stops thinking about it.

They have every meal together. Now that Geralt’s here to open the door, Jaskier always orders in - comfort food, mostly, since that’s what Geralt usually makes for himself. Geralt would probably cook, but Jaskier doesn’t ask him to. He doesn’t want this to feel like work for Geralt.

 _This isn’t happiness,_ Jaskier writes down whenever he begins to forget it.

This isn’t happiness, but it’s better than not seeing each other. It hurts, but they understand each other; no one else in the world does, after Jaskier did such a thorough job rewriting the story.

He just… he likes having Geralt with him. He always has. Nothing can touch him except Geralt himself.

When the tension’s built up enough between them, when he can’t take it anymore, he takes Geralt to his bedroom one night and unwraps him like a gift.

He pushes down on Geralt’s shoulders so he’ll sit on the edge of the bed and then stands between Geralt’s legs, marveling at this man who made Jaskier’s life. At his wide shoulders and his long hair, the way he doesn’t like to be looked at but stays so still under Jaskier’s eyes; his open hands against the sheets, his parted lips, his chest rising and falling.

He puts his hands on Geralt’s cheeks and watches Geralt’s eyes fall shut. On impulse, he leans down and kisses him, and it’s softer than he thought it would be. He can’t stop himself; doesn’t try very hard. He catches a whiff of Geralt’s shampoo and it’s the same he’s always used, and it hits Jaskier somewhere he didn’t think he could access anymore: he loves Geralt.

Loves him, again. Could never bring himself to hate him, and now -

“Say my name,” he whispers against Geralt’s lips.

“Jaskier,” he breathes.

“My real name.” And then, “Please,” because he’s not sure he deserves it, after all the years he didn’t let Geralt go and Geralt never once complained. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, but he was. He knows he was.

“Julian,” Geralt says. It catches in his throat, like he put a barrier there against saying it. “What -”

“Hush now,” he whispers back, like it’s that simple. It’s the second-hardest thing he’s ever done, but he _has_ to tell Geralt. The truth belongs to both of them. “I missed you so much, all this time. I never said. But I’m saying it now, so I want - I need you to listen. I need you to know.

“You’ve always been it for me. I haven’t really seen anyone else since I first saw you in that awful club. A year without you was all I could take, and I just spent it thinking of you.”

They both draw a breath after that, looking at each other. How long has it been, now, since they didn’t try to keep anything off their faces? Since he saw anything like nerves on Geralt’s familiar face? Or allowed anything at all to show on his own?

They kiss again, and it’s never been tender between them like this. Not even the first time, when they were so young and so, so stupid. They didn’t know how much they could hurt each other then, but now they do. It’s so tender it makes Jaskier ache, knowing how they got here. What it cost them.

But that mythical shore he thought he’d never see again feels within reach, here in his house in LA where he hid like a wounded animal. He wants so badly for Geralt to stay, and be the only person who calls Jaskier by name, and have it mean what he hopes it does.

Maybe tomorrow they can go to the beach. He wants to know which of the songs was right - the happy one, or the sad. Wants to watch Geralt walk into the shallow water and then join him, keep walking until it reaches their shoulders, and take his hand so the waves don’t pull them apart.

But first, he’ll let Geralt touch him as softly as he wants. He feels real under Geralt’s hands. He will never sing about this, but he will sing about everything else.

**Author's Note:**

> cry with me about them on tumblr @soundslikepenance


End file.
